"Space Jews" to "Funny She Doesn't Look Druish"?: Space Jews

Bajorans are based off gypsies. Not Jews.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Well, if you paint the Bajorans in the broadest strokes possible (Religious People oppressed by a facist organization with a penchant for labor camps) I can see how people would go OMFG! Space Jews! though it kinda falls apart on closer inspection.

Gypsies? Really considering the stereotypes most often associated with the Romani people  ^*

in fiction (Nomads, penchant for criminality, festive, fortune telling) none of those particularly fit the Bajorans except maybe for the fortune telling, and that's more due to the Prophets...

Look at the clothing that they wear some time when it's not Troy in uniform. I'll see if I can find good shots of her mother, but her fashion tended to look vaguely inspired by them.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Troi's a Betazoid. Bajorans are the funny nose people of Deep Space Nine.

Anywho, back to the topic at hand. Seems there is some misuse.

edited 14th Dec '10 12:01:24 AM by Ghilz

Whoops. Sorry. Mixed them up. Back to the topic at hand. I think there's some pretty serious evidence shown that the trope name is limiting the trope.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

I remember defending this against DQZ in the last discussion with pretty much the same arguements: most of the examples cited as misuse are technically correct. Instead of rehashing that though, I think now that maybe a compromise is in order: Make Stereotypes In Space (or whatever you deem to call it) as a supertrope and narrow the definition of Space Jews to Jewish stereotypes Recycled In Space.

edited 14th Dec '10 7:44:24 AM by Elle

While cited misuse is "technically correct," if a sci-fi work has multiple alien characters displaying a variety of separate human ethnic stereotypes (like in Star Wars) and only the "Jewish" aliens are being mentioned, that's a problem.

Keeping the name Space Jews also has the drawback of people confusing it for simply "actual Jewish people in space," which is also evident.

edited 14th Dec '10 7:54:01 AM by SeanMurrayI

^ But harder to prove, and needs people familiar with the works to confirm. It's not fair to cite them as misuse without going that further step.

^It's not hard to prove at all; if Space Jews is written to reflect ALL human ethnic stereotypes depicted in alien caricatures, then why is something like Star Wars only listing the "Jewish" ones when there are other very clear examples of other stereotypes that almost anybody who's seen the movies could list off the top of their heads (Jar Jar Binks being a racist African/Jamaican stereotype, Trade Federation races behaving like Asian businessmen, etc.)?

The Phantom Menace page even lists all the stereotyped characters but only mentions Space Jews as a reference specifically about the Jewish stereotype when the trope, in fact, would cover all of these caricatures.

People are obviously only looking at the trope name, and several specific details about the trope are being ignored because of it.

edited 14th Dec '10 8:07:01 AM by SeanMurrayI

Plus in the wicks I listed, some of the examples note aspects of Jewish people unrelated to stereotypes, like persecution.

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

That's an issue related to disagreement over what you include in the stereotype, not the issue at hand.

Sean Murray picked out a piece of proof. Even if we found only 15 or 20 others that one of us could identify by our familiarity, that would be somewhat significant.

But you know what? Fuck the misuse. Several tropes have been made of "Space Culture" format which not only makes the first misuse issue even harder, but adds another one and then also means that keeping this makes naming a whole class of other tropes more difficult. When you get 'all' of these floating around, it gets confounding so we will need to find an agreed upon way to organise them.

Sorry but can we rename the thread if we're actually going to talk about a non-stupid rename reason?

I should add I'm going to look into Space Romans next.

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

I still stand by my earlier suggestion of making Stereotypes In Space a supertrope and rewriting Space Jews, in case that got lost in transit.

Well that could be an option for a page action crowner.

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

Agreed.

More to the point about misuse though, I'd also say that every instance Dragon Quest Z pointed out about human characters demonstrating racial stereotypes should be labeled automatically as misuse as the description for Space Jews clearly specifies that this is about nonhuman characters, 300 being the biggest offender for listing the trope in a story that has nothing to do with aliens or outer space (I don't care how egregious the Persian caricatures are; it's simply not an example).

Among other pages describing alien races fitting this trope, the Star Trek pages make for a curious case. Star Trek: The Next Generation is the only series to list this as a trope; among it's examples, one is a reference to humans exhibiting Irish stereotypes (too bad they're human), another only mentions the Ferengi without making any mention of what ethnicity they're stereotyping  ^*

, and makes a very vague reference to "Space Africans."

It's also worth noting that while Star Trek alien races described on the main Space Jews article are all very varied, a few references to some species being stand-ins for Communists are a little odd if only because "Communist" would never be considered an ethnicity by anyone and would only moderately count as part of a Soviet stereotype (and that would only count for Star Trek canon created during the Cold War).

edited 14th Dec '10 12:32:23 PM by SeanMurrayI

The communist thing is an ethnicity if you're looking at it from the standpoint of the cold war world it was written in. It's basically the USSR which at the time in America was thought of as Communists and has different stereotypes to it than Russian culture in general.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

But that would be Planet of Hats, not this trope.

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

"I want to rename it because some think it's just about Jewish people."

Then they're not reading the page description right below the title. It doesn't take long.

^It's still a fuck up all the same. Giving a trope with a name often mistaken for the specific, instead of the general, a new one that reflects a broader focus means that the tropers who only read the [Trope Name] will include more general examples.

edited 26th Jan '11 7:11:54 PM by SeanMurrayI

And we have a lot of tropers who just read the trope name and then assume they understand the trope.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

So... Is there enough misuse (or limiting to just Jewish stereotypes) to warrant some kind of action, whether rename or not? Or should we just close this to get rid of the banner?

Related question: is "tropers seem to be limiting examples to Jewish stereotypes because of the name, even though the trope is broader than that" misuse or not?

We should close this, it's been months.

The child is father to the man —Oedipus

I think we should make a crowner for this one. There's evidence of limited use and going through the arguments again which we'd have to do if we locked this would just be irksome.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

As always, limited use demonstrates very little. Moreover, no one touched this thread for three months, so clearly there's not a huge amount of interest in changing this.

The child is father to the man —Oedipus

edited 26th Apr '11 4:29:10 PM by Ghilz